According to the statistics, violent crime rates are down across the United States, and in cities like Providence, Rhode Island, rates have been dropping for the past six years. Meanwhile, studies find that overall police spending is up and municipalities are fighting to keep budgets in line. Is this the “new math?”
Over the last 10 years, Boston has amassed an inventory of 336 unsolved murders. Now, Mayor Martin J. Walsh, District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, and high-ranking members of the Boston police department are promising change: what’s in store to make the city safer?
According to the Boston Herald, one initiative is the creation of a community advisory group which will partner community leaders with police to help address crime in specific neighborhoods. Taking this idea a step further is the privately-operated StreetSafe Boston which looks for ways to assist troubled youth at risk of becoming repeat offenders in adulthood.
There’s a clear mandate here to create a more community-minded Boston, one that focuses on neighborhoods rallying together behind disenfranchised youth to take back control of their streets and help limit crime through accountability and understanding — but that’s just the beginning.
The mayoral race in Providence is heating up — both Republican and Democratic candidates are calling out opponents who they say haven’t done enough. Their big concern? Crime.
According to a recent WPRI.com article, the crime reduction plan forwarded by Republican Michael Solomon came under fire from Democrat Brett Smiley, who says that his opponent “has not provided any real leadership on public safety.” Solomon’s campaign manager shot back at Smiley, calling his statement “more sad, empty rhetoric from someone who hasn’t even lived in the city for ten years.”
Is your burglar alarm system programmed with a communication timer test?
Just ask officials at the Siskiyou County Courthouse in California, who were shocked to discover that the failure of the security system protecting $3 million in gold resulted in a clean getaway for the thieves who simply smashed a hole in the glass case protecting the historical artifacts and grabbed everything they could.
The gold nuggets had been a theft target once before in 1979, when the silent alarm functioned as intended and the would-be marauders were apprehended roughly a block away from the courthouse with the illicit wares in their possession. This time, however, the vibration alarm that was meant to protect the irreplaceable gold nuggets – some of which date back to the town’s founding – did not respond at all. A town spokesperson stated that the system had been properly armed, and that the county was working with its security provider to get to the bottom of the glitch.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of the sad story surrounding the Siskiyou gold is a footnote at the bottom of the article that mentions an annual security alarm test schedule. According to the Courthouse, the last test occurred in August of 2011, nearly seven months before the February theft.
There is an important lesson that business and property owners can learn from the tragic tale of the Siskiyou theft, and that is that it’s not enough to rely on a single alarm system test every 12 months. So much can happen within a year’s time, especially in a heavily-trafficked space such as a courthouse or a retail space, that it really becomes necessary to perform an alarm system test at least once per quarter, if not once per month.
American Alarm programs a timer test with its business security systems that can send communications weekly or daily, depending on the type of signals being monitored. If our central station operators do not receive a signal, we contact the owner immediately to determine the cause of the missed communication, and find a solution to the issue.
It costs nothing to make sure that your alarm system is functioning up to spec – what’s the price tag of not knowing? In the case of Siskiyou County, the figure would seem to be $3 million.
